Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers is about being dead, and all of the fun things that happen to you when you are. Author Mary Roach approaches a delicate (and sometimes disgusting) subject with humor, without robbing her subjects of their dignity. Believe me, this book is not for the squeamish. While most of it is relatively tame, there is some discussion of rice 'infestations' and other subjects best not discussed at dinner. Readers will learn that a corpse has (or has had) the 'options' of being blown up, shot, eaten, cut up, turned into art, crucified, thrown from heights, and just being left around to rot to see what happens, and what each of them looks (and smells) like.

The author obviously has a strong bent against traditional western burial, for reasons that become obvious after Chapter 3 (I don't know about you, but anal sutures doesn't sound like fun, even if one is dead when it happens). She strongly supports organ donation, and is very convincing about it. She also mentions a few relatively new ideas about what to do with a body, including an option in Sweden, turning the body of your loved one into fertilizer and using it to grow a tree. Interestingly enough, I recently read Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which includes a large family that does exactly this with the dead, using their remains not to fertilize their fields, but a small garden where the dead 'become roses and daffodils and peonies'. Sound pretty decent as it goes, actually.

It's certainly rather morbid, but I imagine that just about anyone is friends with someone who would like this book. If you find the fact that Herophilus took to dissecting live criminals (some accounts claimed over 600 of them) around 300 BC to be an interesting piece of historical trivia, this could be the book for you.